Christ Was Once This Little

(An old post re-shared) Pondering things in my heart that have been pondered many times before

I am not the first mother to feel a profound and surreal closeness with Mary, the mother of Jesus, at Advent. Much has been written— much more beautifully than I ever could— on the topic of the Incarnation and the real, true, tangible impact of the Word made flesh and dwelling amongst us.

But I think part of the beauty of the way Love came down at Christmas is that it strikes each one of us who love Him in a special and personal way.

It strikes me tonight as I sit in a darkened room, rocking my own baby and singing to him of a silent night, a holy night, begging my squirming bundle of wiggles to sleep in heavenly peace.

It moves me to tears when I hear the much-maligned “Mary, Did You Know?”— a rhetorical question, of course, because the angel told her and she did know. But she also had to see it, to live it out. How could she fully grasp, with head and heart, the profundity of the Messiah kicking her rib cage before she saw Him resurrected?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?
That when you’ve kissed your little baby, you’ve kissed the face of God?

(image via Anna K @thefoxmatriarch on Twitter, used with permission)

It meets me where I am as I potty train a mortal child, as I run after my own little boy and hear him tell his first jokes and ask questions that stop me in my tracks and fling his arms around me and say “I wuv you so much,” because Jesus did all this to His mother, too.

Jesus was a baby, soft and velvety warm in Mary’s arms as she rocked him to sleep. Jesus was a toddler, learning to walk and tripping and falling down and crying over a scraped knee. Jesus was a small boy, shrieking with delight over games and merriment with other children. Jesus touched His mother’s face with baby fingernails that were just a little too sharp, woke in the night and needed to be comforted, slept not like a little angel but like the One who made the angels. He was God. He was one of us. He was a baby.

Mary knew, and I know. But every Christmas, I see it anew. I see it in my sons’ faces, made in the image of God. I hear it on the radio as “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” bursts through the static with glory-to-the-newborn-King even in the midst of cheesy sleigh bells. I feel it in the tears that burn at the corners of my eyes as I sing in church, “Raise, raise the song on high! The virgin sings her lullaby. Hail, hail, for Christ is born; the Babe, the Son of Mary.”

It is an old, old story of a mother and a baby, so like so many others and yet more wonderful than any other story of a mother and a Baby could ever be. “The God of the universe became a wiggling baby in order to get close to you,” Tim Keller wrote in 2016. So complex and so simple— and every year it is written on my heart again.

The sleeping child Mary held was the great I Am. The sleeping child I am holding is one of billions— “babies are common enough,” as Mrs. Gibson says in Anne of Windy Poplars, and yet this baby is as precious in God’s sight as every other one that has ever lived. Common enough, and yet every downy hair on his head is numbered by his heavenly Father.

Perhaps none of my musings are original. There is, after all, nothing really new under the sun. Perhaps every mother who loves Jesus has thought of the infant Christ as she nestled her own infant close. And that thought, too— that thread connecting all of us rocking our children to sleep over two thousand years— touches my heart at Christmas.

Shepherds and wise men will kneel and adore him
Seraphim round him their vigil will keep
Nations proclaim him their Lord and their Saviour
But Mary will hold him and sing him to sleep
-"Candlelight Carol” by John Rutter

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This piece was originally published in 2023.